


I Might Never Be the Lonely One

by ViciousRhythm



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Napping, hand-holding, it's just really fluffy, so much cute you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 08:54:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6560062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViciousRhythm/pseuds/ViciousRhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was given this: "Co-napping is a beautiful thing. Knock out with me so I know it’s real" and this: "perfect couple: one person has cold hands, the other has warm hands. together, they maintain the ideal temperature for hand holding" and this fic is the resulting feel-good fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Might Never Be the Lonely One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheJGatsby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/gifts).



> This sappy fluff brought to you by TheJGatsby sending me text posts and letting me blurt out my feelings in fic form.

Rey passes out in the training room because she is simply too tired to move herself anywhere else, and the mats are softer than the floor of her AT-AT had ever been so it's not even a big deal. As word gets around the base on D'Qar, more and more people are willing to try to stop Rey - the next Jedi! - on her way back to her room for a proper nap, so she relegates a whole corner of the training room to being her nap spot.

This is of course ruined, just like everything else, by the arrival of Kylo Ren.

He stays out of her way for the most part, especially when there are witnesses to glare at him for even daring to turn his head in her direction. During training, however, he reverts to the arrogant, somehow earnestly needy man Rey had met on Starkiller. He spars with her with all the enthusiasm of the teacher he wanted to be once upon a time, and gets angry when she bests him, but he stands back up now. It's an irritating habit he picked up when he turned from the Dark Side.

The first time Rey catches him napping in Her Spot, she dumps a glass of water on his head. In the ensuing yelling match, she doesn't actually remember to tell him it's _her_ spot and not to go around stealing napping spots all willy-nilly. So of course she finds him there again. T his time, Rey has been fighting invisible enemies for hours and can't get her mind to quiet for meditation (in hindsight, that might be his fault, she never can get her mind in order when he's too near) and Rey doesn't have the patience or energy to fight with him.

Instead of fetching water to douse him again, she kicks his shin and shoves the grumbling, half-conscious man over until her little pile of mats and pillows behind the towering rack of weights has enough room for her too. She drops onto it unceremoniously, and can feel Kylo wake a bit and turn to look at her, even if she can't see it.

"Go back to sleep," she orders shortly. "And don't you dare snore."

Shockingly, he listens, rolling over and shuffling until his back is half an inch from her spine, sleep-warmth radiating off of him and making Rey's cooling sweat even more uncomfortable. She manages to fall asleep despite it, and it's a good nap, the kind that ends with her waking up feeling refreshed instead of disoriented.

Waking up next to  _ him _ is disorienting in an entirely different way, however, and Rey stares at Kylo Ren's ungraceful sleeping face for a few seconds longer than she can justify. His mouth is open slightly, but at least he's not snoring. It would have woken her. His movement apparently didn't do that, because Rey distinctly remembers falling asleep back to back, and she's on her back now, Kylo curled close against her side in what can't be a comfortable position for him.

A cruel part of her wants to punch him awake, but Rey swallows that shallow the urge in favor of trying to puzzle him out. It's a casual hobby of hers, trying to figure out what he's doing here and whether he'll eventually betray all of them. Asleep, he doesn't look all that threatening, especially with a strand of his hair sticking to the corner of his mouth and the shadow of stubble on his cheeks. Rey has never been close enough to notice that before.

She resolves to leave him sleeping. Rey has no idea how long he'd been asleep before she arrived, and he's still dead to the world, so he must really need the rest. Probably tired from all the play-acting at being a good guy, she thinks meanly, but she doesn't wake him. Instead, Rey extracts herself carefully without jostling him and stands.

He frowns a bit in his sleep after a second, and his knees pull up a bit while his arm stretches forward a few inches to where her ribcage had been a moment ago. He looks small like that, tucked up legs and reaching fingers, and Rey feels an unwilling blossoming of empathy for him. She's slept alone all her life, she knows the posture of someone trying not to wish for the comfort of another body beside hers.

It doesn't change anything. She's still got plenty of other things to do today that don't include napping with an ex-First Order commander. Rey leaves him where he lays, but she closes the door quietly, and she doesn't bother to tell him about it being Her Spot when she sees him next. It's just a place to sleep. She doesn't have to be that selfish about it if they can both fit.

It starts with napping in the training room, but that certainly isn't where it ends.

Rey isn't sure where it will end, to be perfectly honest. Where they are now is an uncertain truce of sorts, where she shares her napping spot and Kylo stops avoiding her like the plague and starts making an effort to be a normal human being. It's very upsetting, honestly.

He doesn't sit with her and Finn and Poe at first, but he does take a seat at the same table some five feet away. Finn is the one who gets frustrated with it first, and scoots down to sit closer to him with a determinedly welcoming look on his face. Poe and Rey make eye contact across the table to be sure neither of them is seeing things. Kylo, for his part, looks hugely uncomfortable, staring hard down at his plate but not actually eating anything.

"Come on, guys," Finn says when the tension stretches and no one makes a move. Poe shrugs at Rey, letting her follow first, and so she does. Kylo is seated on her side of the table, and she takes care not to sit too close to him. She's slept next to him a few times now, but there's something different about physical contact where anyone could see it, and Rey avoids any accidental touch.

"So," Poe says, a show of support for Finn more than anything. "Are we making friends?"

Poe's brazen way of pointing out the obvious awkwardness does more to alleviate it than is logical, but then Poe has always had a talent for finding ways of putting people at ease in strange ways. Finn talks about the food, talks about how different it is from First Order rations, and Kylo eventually chimes in on the topic when it's clear Finn is determined to get him to say _something._

Rey stays largely quiet, trapped between the familiarity of being physically close to him and the alien sensation of trying to be friendly with him. She has much more practice beating him with training sabers than speaking to him.

It becomes a pattern, Kylo sitting just a little out of range and Finn rolling his eyes and shoving his plate down the table. Rey and Poe follow with more ease every time until they don't even bother sitting apart at the beginning of meals. Finn tells her in private that he'd done something similar when he'd been under the First Order. He'd never quit fit in with the other troopers, and no one had reached out to him like he'd always hoped, so Finn is enormously proud that he can do it for someone else, even if that someone is Kylo Ren.

Something about that makes Rey soften further toward Kylo. For all he's done, he is at the end of the day a man who can't even bring himself to force his presence on others when he so clearly and desperately wants the company. She helps Finn lure him into conversation and Poe eventually throws in his genuine effort instead of his begrudging attempts. Kylo is awkward at best, fumbling social interaction on the best of days, but he improves in slow trickles.

It lends a layer of camaraderie to their training sessions, and Rey catches herself teasing him when she has him on the defensive, relishing the challenge when he makes her fight back with everything she has. The first time she offers him a hand up after sweeping his legs out from under him, she startles at how warm his hands are.

It's cold on D'Qar, at least compared to Jakku. Rey's new clothes help, made of sturdy cotton and wool that hold in heat. Luke had had to lend her every cloak and blanket he had on Ahch-To when she'd first arrived, to ward off the chill and wind. Rey can never quite get warm enough, it seems, after so long living in a desert.

Kylo is not a source of warmth she could have ever predicted, but he catches her shivering once when the wind picks up on the airfield, and automatically rubs his hands over her shoulders before he catches himself. He freezes then, hands pulling back from her to hover awkwardly in the air an inch away from her skin. Rey doesn't make him put them back on her skin, because that would be ridiculous, but she misses them anyway, the skin of her upper arms even more freezing in their absence.

Hand-holding isn't strange to her anymore, not with Finn and Poe around, and as Kylo folds into their little friend group, she finds herself resisting the urge to take his hand. It shouldn't be weird. She holds Finn's and Poe's hand all the time, but Kylo's hands are a temptation all their own, warm and large and in possession of a callus that matches hers from his lightsaber.

Rey thinks about it too much, really. They're only hands. But still, she can't stop herself when they're on a chilly planet where it rains for the three days they're there. Her fingers are stiff and cold around her saber while they keep up practice as Luke insisted before the left, and when they pause, Rey takes Kylo's hands in hers and cups them to make a shield. He lets her, watching perplexed as Rey breathes heavily into his palms and then wraps them around her knuckles.

"I can't feel my fingers," she says quietly, like that will excuse her actions. He lets it go, not meeting her eye, but squeezing her fingers a bit, rubbing his thumbs over the back of her hands for a moment. It's nice, Rey thinks, and she tries to remember what it felt like to hate him and comes up with only regret and deep sadness instead. It's so much better being fond of this quiet, questioning man than it was hating the wrathful character he'd tried so hard to embody before.

Her obsession with his hands continues, but Rey doesn't stop herself from taking them at her leisure anymore. She's as willing to grab onto his long fingers and pull him around as she is with any of her friends, and he's more cooperative about it than Poe, less clingy than Finn. Kylo holds onto her hand like he's been waiting for it, like she could let go any moment and his palm would be open for her still. It's easy to hold his hand.

She doesn't see it coming when those hands - always open, always warm - trap her in place when she's in the middle of a story about beating Jessika in a footrace. She doesn't see it coming when he leans forward and presses his lips to her forehead, just above her left eyebrow. Rey isn't stupid, however, and she's ready when his mouth moves from her brow to her lips, and she wraps her own fingers around his wrists as he kisses her slowly, like she might run.

She holds onto him and gives as good as she gets, sliding her palms against his and lacing their fingers together. His hands are still warm, maybe even a little sweaty like he's nervous, but Rey's are dry and chilly, and she balances him out. The thought is one she likes very much, smiling against his mouth so their kiss breaks with her beaming.

"I'm sorry," he says, low and a bit winded. Rey doesn't bother dignifying that with a verbal response. She simply uses the grip she has on his hands to pull him toward her and kisses him herself. There's plenty he can still be sorry about, but this? This warmth and comfort and careful touch, this is not one of them.


End file.
